Online retailers scored big with Cyber Monday, and the state Department of Revenue doesn’t want to be forgotten.

Anyone shopping online is supposed to pay the “use tax” — the equivalent of the 6-percent sales tax on goods purchased in Pennsylvania. The tax also applies to catalog shopping and buying goods in brick-and-mortar stores outside the state.

The use tax has been on the books for 58 years, but many taxpayers are unaware it exists. Many online retailers don’t collect it. The state acknowledges it’s missing out on untold millions in revenue.

Lacking the ability to force everyone to pay up, the state Revenue Department has been working on education. The department is urging holiday shoppers to check receipts for sales tax charges and to pay up if the retailer didn’t collect it.

Cyber Monday would likely yield good news for Pennsylvania if all online retailers collected the tax or if shoppers paid up.

Nationwide, online sales on Cyber Monday were up midafternoon by 15 percent from a year ago, according to data from IBM Benchmark.

If online vendors were required to collect the use tax from shoppers, Carnegie-Mellon University professor Robert Strauss estimates it would put as much as $388 million in the state’s coffers in 2012.

Congress is debating legislative proposals that would empower states to collect sales taxes from online retailers. Brick-and-mortar business owners are turning up the heat about the unfair advantage for online vendors.

Last month, Greg Rozman of Rozman Bros. Appliances in Swatara Township traveled to Washington, D.C., joining other small-business owners to urge Congress to address the issue.

State officials are growing impatient with Congress’ inability to resolve this issue, and some states are taking new steps to collect it.

“The fiscal crunch that most states are facing right now has given new life to those efforts,” said Michael Mazerov, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan group.

California and Tennessee have struck agreements with online giant Amazon to collect sales tax by 2013.

Some states have begun enforcing use tax reporting on big-ticket items.

“They will, for example, audit their own retailers, and if those retailers are shipping big-ticket items to customers in other states, they very well may have an exchange of information agreement with their counterparts in other states to share the same information with them,” he said.

Revenue department spokeswoman Elizabeth Brassell said Pennsylvania does maintain agreements with other states to share some information about purchases. She declined to name or number of the states.

To get more people to pay up, the revenue department is simplifying the use tax reporting process. It is adding a line for the use tax on the state’s personal income tax return, or PA-40, starting with the 2011 tax year. Previously, this was done on a separate form. The department also is evaluating other efforts, Brassell said.

Court rulings complicate collection efforts. In 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states can’t compel a company to collect sales tax unless it has a physical presence in that state.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

To learn more

To find out about the use tax and how to pay it, go online:

www.revenue.state.pa.us /usetax. The site provides a table that allows those who don’t keep track of online purchases to estimate what they owe. Those earning between $30,000 and $50,000 would likely owe $17.

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